So I have reached a wall with Actionscript 3 and Adobe's "GameInput Class". They have been asked to work on joystick input for several years now and simply haven't done anything outside of AIR for TV (nobody cares).

I have recently been making some noise about this and instead of wasting anymore time on it, I just moved on to C# only to be contacted by Christophe Herreman recently about the thread I made on Adobe.com with some great news.

He has worked on creating an ANE that will allow joystick support on the desktop platform. I would appreciate it if any of the AS3 developers would test this and support this project as I see it to be pretty important for AS3 devs.

He's already contacted Adobe about this. Unfortunately they've just recently released a new version of AIR (today, I think) but if we make some noise and they see interest maybe we could get it officially added as early as next update assuming everything is in working order.

The hilarious thing is that I was bullying Adobe's twitter the other day about the new HTML5 specs for gamepad input.

A friend has already written a javascript library to read gamepad input - so right now you could make a javascript bridge (binding javascript executed in the browser to actionscript callbacks) that can read gamepad input in some browsers:

As a matter of fact that's the main "seriously Adobe?" thing I hold against Flash.

You are not alone there. I think one of the things preventing this from getting implemented was that nobody speaks up about it, they just move on. Hopefully this lights a fire under them to get it done.

Keep in mind that this is only for AIR at the moment. I'm sure there is a ton of security they would have to look into for something that looks for USB input for web-based Flash.